Walt Humphries
Northern News Services

Norman Wells (July 16/01) - Imagine fungi and mushrooms growing to be 20, 40 maybe even 60 feet tall. Imagine how fast they grow and disintegrate. Imagine puffballs several meters across and how many spores they would produce.

Imagine worms several meters long, dragonflies with three-foot wing spans, mosquitoes the size of sparrows and of course the dinosaurs.

We're on the geological time machine again, with the annual Great Norman Wells Fossil Hunt.

We can do a lot and learn a lot but then we have to use our imagination to fill in the gaps because the fossil record is never 100% complete. Big things and things with hard parts tend to get preserved in the fossil record, but soft bodied objects, seldom get preserved.

If you were to go to the lakes and oceans, again some things would look familiar and others would be bizarre to us. If you go to fossil canyon by Jackfish Lake you can see the remains of a tropical corral reef. Fossils of corral and shellfish are everywhere.

Remember that there would also be plants, fishes and other creatures swimming in the waters and feeding off of the reef. The water would be alive with trilobites and cephalopoda.

Trilobites are prized by collectors, because they come in so many forms and sizes and there must have been billions of them. A few trilobites have been found to date in fossil canyon and I'm willing to bet there are plenty of others out there to be found. Cephalopoda were giant shellfish who swam around. Sort of like squid and octopuses with shells. There would have been also been jellyfish and many other strange creatures, who didn't become fossilized easily or who only show up in the fossil record occasionally.

Maybe a prehistoric shark or one of the aquatic critters of the era died at the reef and lies waiting to be rediscovered. Maybe it is some sort of sea snake or ancient unknown mammal, which got washed there.

That is part of the fun and excitement of hunting for fossils. In the canyon you find mostly corrals and shellfish or clams because they got preserved the easiest but you never know what you might uncover. It might be something rare and unique or something that has never been discovered before.

This year the Great Norman Wells Fossil Hunt will take place from August 4th to the 11th, so its not too late for people to attend. For more information visit the Norman Wells Web Site or phone Cindy at the town office at 867 587-2238.

It looks like this year's fossil hunt will attract visitors from across North America and it promises to be a good week of fossil hunting in some spectacular country.

By studying rocks and fossils, a partial window on the past is open to us. Basically there are two types of fossils. There are true fossils where a tree trunk, the skeleton of a creature or its shell get buried in mud and preserved.

Trace fossils are the tracks a creature leaves behind, its burrow or even its bite marks on something. From true fossils and trace models, the experts try to piece together a picture of the past.

We can take a rock formation from the past and age date it, so that we know how long ago it occurred. We can then dig out all its fossils and begin to get a picture of what that time period was like.

This year The Fossil Hunt at Norman Wells will give people another chance to go exploring and who knows what might get found.